In a typical cloud-based data center, a large collection of interconnected servers provides computing and/or storage capacity for execution of various applications. For example, a data center may comprise a facility that hosts applications and services for subscribers, i.e., customers of data center. The data center may, for example, host all of the infrastructure equipment, such as networking and storage systems, redundant power supplies, and environmental controls. In most data centers, clusters of storage systems and application servers are interconnected via high-speed switch fabric provided by one or more tiers of physical network switches and routers. More sophisticated data centers provide infrastructure spread throughout the world with subscriber support equipment located in various physical hosting facilities.
Data centers tend to utilize either propriety switch fabric with proprietary communication techniques or off-the-shelf switching components that switch packets conforming to conventional packet-based communication protocols. Proprietary switch fabric can provide high performance, but can sometimes be more costly and, in some cases, may provide a single point of failure for the network. Off-the-shelf packet-based switching components may be less expensive, but can result in lossy, non-deterministic behavior.